Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles: The Adventure Game

Byron Preiss Multimedia appears to be stuck in a sci-fi time warp. Just last month it released a mediocre game, Robot City, based on decades-old fiction by Isaac Asimov; now it's given the same treatment to a favorite fantasy writer, Ray Bradbury. But where Ray Bradbury's novels and stories are unfailingly original, this disc is basically a Myst rip-off in which players wander through Martian ruins searching for obscure clues. My advice: Skip the game and savor the accompanying interview with the old master himself, who touchingly describes staying up all night awaiting news of the Viking probe's landing on Mars in 1976. C+